D wiki

[David Nadlinger]

On Tuesday, 13 November 2012 at 14:51:58 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> On 11/13/12 3:23 AM, Thomas Koch wrote:
>> Tobias Pankrath proposed the github wiki engine (free 
>> software[3]) and I
>> agreed that it would be best to just enable the wiki in a new 
>> project at the
>> D github account[4].

In case you didn't catch the original thread, I also pointed out 
there that switching from ProWiki to Gollum might be a case of 
jumping from the frying pad into the fire. Gollum, the GitHub 
wiki software, supports none of the useful features of common 
Wiki software, such as search (!), comfortable history browsing, 
talk pages, wach lists, permission control, etc. There are also a 
couple of UI issues which make it less than ideal for larger 
installations, like the fact that you can accidentally 
change/break a page URL very easily by just editing the main 
title box.

I suggested using MediaWiki instead, the same wiki engine used by 
Wikipedia (familiarity bonus!) and many big open source 
communities (Arch/Fedora/Gentoo/Suse, KDE, OpenOffice, Haskell, 
…).


> I think that's a great idea. I'm not a frequent user of our 
> Wiki, […]

You should be, just like all of us should. ;)  I feel that way 
too much of the fruits of our collective labor/discussions gets 
lost in the fairly impenetrable newsgroups archives (for the 
record, I'm only very infrequently contributing to the wiki as 
well, mostly because of the annoyances already discussed).


> The only thing we need to worry about is preserving links lest 
> Google search pagerank gets lost. Is it possible to keep the 
> old link convention?

Hardly, without owning prowiki.org. Also, I'm not even sure if 
URLs like http://prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?GuiLibraries would 
be a good candidate for keeping – I'd say, let's move to 
http://wiki.dlang.org/GuiLibraries, and then work on keeping 
that. Given that wiki4d never was immensely popular, I think we 
can bear that change. In fact, I think the much bigger problem 
compared to search engine ranking would be breaking 
links/bookmarks. Maybe, moving to wiki.dlang.org would even lead 
to a _better_ ranking on D-related topics.

Maybe Helmut Leitner would also be willing to set up to 
http://prowiki.org/wiki4d/ 301-redirect to a landing page on the 
new installation (which could in turn also redirect the user to 
the appropriate page, if there is a page with a matching name). 
This way, we could avoid both problems.

The only question raised by my suggestion is hosting. I don't 
know what infrastructure dlang.org is hosted on right now, and if 
running a MediaWiki instance on it would be possible. Given the 
moderate amounts of traffic to expect, I don't think this should 
be an insurmountable problem, though – heck, if it wouldn't 
occasionally be unstable, I would even offer my own VPS (1 GB 
RAM, reasonably fast CPU/disk).

David